Being German Canadian explores how multi-generational families and groups have interacted and shaped each other’s integration and adaptation in Canadian society, focusing on the experiences, histories, and memories of German immigrants and their descendants. As one of Canada’s largest ethnic groups, German Canadians allow for a variety of longitudinal and multi-generational studies that explore how different generations have negotiated and transmitted diverse individual experiences, collective memories, and national narratives. Drawing on recent research in memory and migration studies, this volume studies how twentieth-century violence shaped the integration of immigrants and their descendants. More broadly, the collection seeks to document the state of the field in German-Canadian history. Being German Canadian brings together senior and junior scholars from History and related disciplines to investigate the relationship between, and significance of, the concepts of generation and memory for the study of immigration and ethnic history. It aims to move immigration historiography towards exploring the often fraught relationship among different immigrant generations—whether generation is defined according to age cohort or era of arrival.

In German Canadians: Community Formation, Transformation and Contribution to Canadian Life, Grenke explores important themes in the German Canadian experience, including immigration, social life, the war experiences, intermarriage, political participation and the German contribution to Canadian life. Focusing on language maintenance and transition, the study explores their effect on the formation and decline of different German Canadian communities as they emerged and dissolved. While the reader may, or may not, agree with some of the conclusions reached, the work should, nevertheless, stimulate reflection and discussion.

During the years 1933 to 1939, a pro-Nazi movement developed in Canada. With the support of the German National Socialist Party, Canadian pro-Nazi institutions were formed: clubs, rallies, schools, and newspapers. The movement ended in failure. The author analyzes the reasons for the formation and decline of the National Socialist Party in Canada, describing in the process the general characteristics of the German community in Canada, the extent of Nazi activity in this country, and the influence of the Canadian environment on the movement. The book, well researched and carefully documented, is an original contribution to Canadian history of the 1930s.

Human migration figures prominently in modern world history, and has played a pivotal role in shaping the Canadian national state. Yet while much has been written about Canada's multicultural heritage, little attention has been paid to German migrants although they compose Canada's third largest European ethnic minority. A History of Migration from Germany to Canada, 1850-1939 addresses that gap in the record. Jonathan Wagner considers why Germans left their home country, why they chose to settle in Canada, who assisted their passage, and how they crossed the ocean to their new home, as well as how the Canadian government perceived and solicited them as immigrants. He examines the German context as closely as developments in Canada, offering a new, more complete approach to German-Canadian immigration. This book will appeal to students of German Canadiana, as well as to those interested in Canadian ethnic history, and European and modern international migration.

In the aftermath of World War II, twelve million German expellees lost their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. The overwhelming majority came to occupied Germany. However, expellees found themselves also stranded in Western Europe, Africa and the Americas, which is often overlooked by researchers and the public. Going beyond the standard narratives of flight, vigilante evictions and transfers, this book follows expellees in West Germany and Canada and shows, for example, how German prisoners-of-war, exilees or immigrants experienced the expulsions in distant Canada. As the author illustrates making extensive use of oral histories, their experiences were an integral part of the multi-faceted expellee story even though they were physically absent from their homes. Juxtaposing the record of two countries with disparate public discourses on immigration, the author also reveals how in both countries expellees eventually adopted national identities which, based on their ethno-regional heritage, reflected their experience of extreme nationalism, war and expulsion as well as the initially difficult settlement into a new political, social and cultural environment.

Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities is a study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment. Winnipeg’s migrants chose a receiving society where they knew they would again be a minority group in a foreign country, while Bielefeld’s newcomers believed they were “going home” and were unprepared for the conflict between their imagined homeland and the realities of post-war Germany. Werner also shows that differences in the way the two receiving societies perceived immigrants, and the degree to which secularization and the sexual and media revolutions influenced these perceptions in the two cities, were crucially important in the immigrant experience.